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Tag Archives: E. B. White

The introduction of The Paris Review for Young Readers seems like a good time to think about one of its predecessors: St. Nicholas Magazine, which was published from 1873 to 1940. Though it wasn’t the only children’s magazine of its time, during its heyday St. Nicholas was generally considered the best—a showcase for fine adult writers and a lab for young ones.

Scribner’s, a magazine run by the famous publishing house, approached the successful children’s author Mary Mapes Dodge to be St. Nicholas’s editor. At its inception, Dodge wrote that her publication would not be just “a milk-and-water variety of the periodicals for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other.” She felt that because children spent their days at school, “their heads are strained and taxed with the day’s lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine.” Read More

“I’ve never seen the point of New York,” someone said to me last week, in a foreign city, upon learning that it was my hometown.

I must confess to being nonplussed by this. I hadn’t fielded such an idiotic remark since middle school. Back then, I would have responded in kind with some nonsense—“Well, since it’s not pyramid-shaped, neither have I,” or something about John Stuart Mill, if I knew about him—but now this did not come so easily. Most of us have long since learned that there’s not much sport in breaking the fine-print clauses of the social contract.

And most of us learn the hard way. My most shameful memory is of creeping around a tree, perhaps in second grade, at Reynolds Field, and hissing, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker,” at a mystified five-year-old. I knew instantly that I had not conjured the mystery and allure I’d been going for; that I was, in fact, an ass. I have never admitted that before. I wonder if that kid remembers it. I really hope not.

But now I am a grown-up. So I quoted to him one of the few things I know by heart:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

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An illustration by H. M. Bateman for the Ministry of Health’s WWII-era “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases“ campaign.

Among other things, E. B. White has the distinction of being one of the few writers to really express the misery of seasonal allergies. In “The Summer Catarrh” (1938) he details Daniel Webster’s struggles with hay fever, proclaiming, “there is a fraternity among those who have been tried beyond endurance.”

He exaggerates for effect, of course. Part of the misery of allergies is the knowledge that, generally speaking, they’re as toothless as they are persistent. They’re definitionally endurable—albeit at the expense of that elusive thing, “quality of life.” (“Quality of life,” much like the box we’re supposed to think outside of, seems to be a thing that exists primarily in negative space.) Prescriptions, Claritin, neti pots, humidifiers, special pillow covers: they’re all just panaceas. When you have allergies, you have allergies. To the outsider, it must seem somewhere between hypochondria and a cold—unpleasant, certainly, but mostly just annoying. And it is annoying. It is the least romantic thing in the world. Sniffling, snoring, “itchy, watery” eyes and a malaise that feels like nothing so much as a faint and chronic hangover … these do nothing for the soul at all. Read More

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Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York, and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Sitting alone in my tiny bookshop on a cold February morning, I have the sensation that I’ve conjured a dream into reality. The light is crisp and blue through the door. A flight of red paper swallows—a Valentine homage to Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls”—hangs from the ceiling, fluttering quietly from the heat whooshing out of the floor grate. The room is small, just shy of two hundred fifty square feet, and an old pickled farm table sits squarely in the middle. The top of the table is covered with books, and the shelves lining two of the room’s walls also contain a patchwork of brightly colored spines.

Valentine-themed woodblock prints handmade by my husband line the farm table and a grid of nature-inspired prints hold a wall. We live on an old dairy farm up in northeast Pennsylvania, and instead of cows in our three-bay English barn, we have two etching presses. Mark carves the images into blocks of clear pine, inks them up, and sends them through the press, cranking the smooth silver wheel like a captain on a ship. This is our store together, a kind of celebration of works on paper. We live on Moody Road, and so we call the shop Moody Road Studios.

An artist and a writer, respectively, my husband and I had both been teaching and working in the city for more than a decade, until a little over a year ago. The idea of running a bookshop never entered our consciousness while in New York, mostly because it never could have happened. Space and funding were impossibilities—as one might guess, a writer and an artist in business together don’t quite make for a crack commerce force. But here, on Main Street in the small town of Honesdale, everything clicked into place. Read More

“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.” Margaret Atwood’s rules for writing fiction.

“I would like to write another book for children but I spend all my spare time just answering the letters I get from children about the books I have already written.” —E.B. White, 1961.

Perhaps inevitable but ill-advised: a 50 Shades of Grey book burning. Explains Clare Phillipson, head of the anti-domestic-violence organization Wearside Women in Need, “I do not think I can put into words how vile I think this book is and how dangerous I think the idea is that you get a sophisticated but naive young woman and a much richer, abusive older man who beats her up and does some dreadful things to her sexually.”

Just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Herman Hesse, a film of his time in Ticino.